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OK, I just watched 'The Road' last week and yes it was a good movie in terms of movie making and all that but OMG IT WAS SO DEPRESSING. And I hated the unclear ending because basically all of the possibilities there were for how it could resolve were depressing too. [ObFangirl: OTOH Viggo Mortensen is always nice to look at...]

And I remember on the first post a bunch of people were saying they have read S M Stirling's Emberverse/Nantucketverse stories and that they were rather like fanfic. And yes they certainly are, more so as the story goes along and it veers into the realms more of fantasy than reality-with-Apocalypse, but I really enjoyed them all.

And I have read Parable Of The Sower which has a positive ending and that was the first post-apocalypse book I'd ever read and I literally got to the end and started at the beginning again I found it so brilliant! I really touched something inside me. I have started reading Parable of the Talents but I don't think I ever got to the end, although that may have had more to do with my RL circumstances at the time than the book itself. I should try it again but I have a feeling I got stuck when it looked like the ending would be really depressing...

I was wondering if others had the same experience - that if the survivors look to have a decent chance at building something that will work, the book is enjoyable ... whereas if it's just a slow decent into decay and death then it's just depressing. What do you find?

I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, and an avowed hater of apocalyptic fiction (one of many reasons I won't be watching 2012)*, because there is only so much I can take of the destruction before I need to see something being built up. I recently read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which has been described as post-apocalyptic, including by myself, when explaining what I'm reading to family members and passers-by but what qualifies it as such? What do we mean by apocalyptic? Parable of the Sower shows the bleak aftermath of an economic collapse in the U.S. but if an economic collapse = an apocalypse, then quite a lot of the world counts or has counted in the past? I'm a first generation immigrant myself, economic/social/political upheaval is pretty far from the realm of fiction for me. So what does an apocalypse have to feature? An environmental disaster, as in that one Captain Planet episode, where they go the the future? Nuclear war, as in Threads? The extinction of humanity, as in The Last Man? The subjugation of man by machine, as in The Terminator? Or just overcrowding, as in Soylent Green? Alien invasion, as in Xenogenesis? The actual destruction of the Earth, as in... real life, eventually, when the Sun expands? Are some of these just dystopias? Where are the lines drawn here?

Discuss!

ETA: I have more thoughts about this, in a way that may make me write something at some point, but I'd like to get your opinions.